The north coast of Scotland has been described by one MP as a front line in the fight against Russia.<\/p>\n
That description might feel unlikely – but when the US seized a Russian flagged tanker in the Atlantic, with the assistance of the UK, the battle for Ukraine was indeed brought pretty close to home.<\/p>\n
Despite no prior knowledge of the mission – ministers at Holyrood say they heard about it from the media – the Scottish government is broadly supportive of the action.<\/p>\n
The root of that support? Ministers’ steadfast backing for Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The Defence Secretary John Healy said shadow fleets – which the tanker is understood to be part of – are “vital to Putin’s ongoing illegal invasion”.<\/p>\n
It’s therefore unsurprising that the government in Edinburgh believes the seizure to be the right course of action.<\/p>\n
While ministers may quibble with a lack of communication, no issue is taken with the use of Scottish airbases or airports – that, I’m told, is standard operating procedure.<\/p>\n
In fact, as one senior SNP figure suggests, there is a view that the US and UK could go further, cracking down on many more shadow fleet vessels being used to flout sanctions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The north coast of Scotland has been described by one MP as a front line in the fight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-682611","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115860512716132402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}